Guild Wars 2

ezd.6359:

plasmacutter.2709:

CassieGold.7460:

Vol.5241:

I think the main reason why people started the thread was because they didn’t like DR.

Well the solution didn’t specify anything to fix DR, so I predict a massive amount of ensuing complaints.

The thing is, I think DR may have been a whipping boy for something it wasn’t doing. If you saw yourself doing damage to targets, getting XP for kills, but getting no loot…. it feels like something is wrong, and that must be DR right?

But Colin’s post seems to indicate it had more to do with how we were flagged as ‘loot eligible’ and less with a notion of DR at all.

I’ll reserve final coments for what we see in the patch notes and what the game play actually feels like, but I think this can’t be anything but a good thing.

70% of that thread was not about “no loot”, it was about the proportion of vendor trash items to rares compared to the “other half” of the population.

11/15 was when I went from 3 rares an hour in orr to 1-3 rares a month across my entire account in every zone.

I predict a great deal of continued complaints when it becomes clear this issue of “RNG not being so random” is not resolved.

Btw… I had 3 thoughts…
[speculations]
1) DR for massive reports from bots (i can’t say anything about it, just ideas)
2) Permanent DR for something like participiating in one time karka event (i got 0 loot from them / 3 hours) – DR never reset since that time.
3) They increased damage/mob_hp for the “credit”.

About 3:
I had same MF armor before 11/15 patch and after, i had ~2 rares from each farm event in Orr, after 11/15 – 1-3/hour (nothing changed in my gear).

I started a new character – mesmer. He had much less drop than my thief while leveling (my main, i played him from start). I started to think it is account problem.

I leveled him (mesmer) to 80 some days ago and tried to farm same events. I had not enough time to farm orr events enough, but i did some runs, i receive almost same drop as before 11/15 on my thief. Mesmer has almost 2x burst. With 50% MF on my mesmer i get more rare loot than 120% MF thief.

I think damage dealt to enemies is one of the parameters for determining rarity of loot.
[/speculations]

I hope the problem will be fixed, and two attacks for 1500 damage to enemies in orr will be enough to get kill credit, or i will not be able to farm in orr as thief in MF set.

Tagging in here for a second, from a pure math / code perspective:

If the patch reduces your chances of getting loot by an arbritrary amount, then your chance of getting rare loot is reduced by the same amount.

If: 100 pulls of the slot machine pays out 1 time…. and this stays constant but….
Criteria to be eligible to pull the slot machine changes so taking the same actions (ie, doing the same damage) now only gives you 40 pulls at the slot machine…. you stop seeing rare loot…. you’re not getting enough pulls.

This easily explains why builds focused on ‘tagging’ and characters running high MF (there by trading damage for a better chance of rare loot) are in fact getting less loot.

Example (using squishy numbers that are based on nothing) You have 150% MF, but do 25% less damage than a character with 0% MF. _If- that 25% less damage puts you into a zone where you fall below the eligibility threshhold on mobs then you get less loot…. there by less pulls on the slot machine.

No one is getting completely hosed out of all loot, but the amount of loot that’s piling up is less, and like all sifting operations, fewer nuggets are there to be found.

Just a thought

There are 2 classes that excell at support that stand out to me for you: Guardian, and Elementalist.

Guardian is the tankier of the two, allowing you to wade in deep with your party, and keep boons / heals flowing. At higher levels of proficiency, you come to learn that you can combine 2 attacks to lay down a combo field (light) and use that combo field to cleanse conditions for your party (whirl finisher), or, lay down the same combo field, and grant your party Retilation (damage reflection) with a different finisher (leap.) And that’s just 3 skills on 1 weapon.

It’s not support like you think of support in most games where a healer hangs in the back, and casts party buffs and drops heals…. but it is a very satisfying support class that can also wade into the thick of it and hit things with a really big sword!

Option #2, I don’t know as well, because my ele is only in the mid 30s, but, the class has HUGE support potential, while offering more stand off / range posibility. Elementalist does most of their support in the Water and Earth elements, but don’t thnk you’re limited. An ele can swap ‘attunements’ between all 4 elements on the fly, changing from Fire for damage to Water for healing, and back again as needed (there is a cool down on swapping.)

As you get more proficient with Ele, you will span all 4 elements for combos, and the rich, deep game play that can be found in ele. Some have said that it’s one of the hardest classes to master, but if you like both support, and staying back out of the fray, it’s a good place to go.

One thing I will mention on guardian, since you like the spell slinging arch type, is that they’re not a pure melee character…. I carry a Staff on my guardian, and other guardians in my guild use a Scepter + Shield or Scepter + Focus for their non-melee weapon.

Likewise, the elementalist at point blank range uses 2 daggers, and the best support ele I know is a D/D ele who works hard to make sure he’s spreading boons party wide. The boons are generally more offense oriented, but he can stack Regeneration and Protection as well.

Does that help?

I’m going to suggest something blind, then come back to an important question before I can give you a better answer.

The blind suggestion is: Guardian. The reason for the blind suggestion is that they are inherantly durrable while learning. Now, they do take active play, and they have a great deal of depth that will allow you to continue to love the character for a long time, but you’ll need to learn the ropes like anything else.

That being the blind toss, here’s the question: What style of game play do you like?

If you like to stand off at long range and break things down while keeping yourself out of danger, Ranger can be good for this. That’s not all Ranger is good at, but it is something they excel at with a minimum of skill investment.

If you like to play fast hit and run, Thief is your platform.

If you want to wade into melee….. sooo many classes are good at melee…. Mesmer is awesome in melee, so is warrior, so is guardian, D/D eles (while not technically melee) work in the short range envelope very well.

It comes down to what you like to play with.

I will say that several classes don’t really ‘come into their own’ until later levels with all of your skills unlocked and your traits unlocked, and the way a character plays at max level can be very different from how it plays with leveling. But, the big question is: What kind of game play do you like? From there, we can deduce your best class.

Let me give you the quick and dirty of how Diminished Returns or DR kind of works.

If you park your character by a spot where an event kicks off (lets say: Defend this WP from waves of angry quaggan for 3 minutes) and you do nothing else but slaughter waves of quagon every 10 minutes when the event starts, eventually, the game will throttle your rewards. The reason it does this is an implementation of anti – bot code.

Now, let’s say you slaughter the waves of angry quaggain, then, move to another area and defend another WP, this time from wave after wave of michevious skritt. Then, you escort some poor farmer back home, while defending him from snowball hurling drunken norn. After doing these events, you return to your quaggan besieged waypoint, and fend off the ravening hords…. you get the same rewards.

If you ever want to see it for yourself in action, park your character at an event spawn point and don’t leave it. Jot down your Exp / Karma / Coin rewards each time you do the event. In between, chat with friends, watch TV, or read a book. You will notice that the first time, the event rewards 350 karma, the second time, maybe 313 karma, the 3rd time, 202 karma…. (those are silly numbers pulled from thin air.) This is DR in action, working as intended.

As has been said, keep moving, don’t farm the same mobs / content over and over again, and you’ll be fine. Doesn’t mean you have to leave the map, just move around to the different things happening on the map.

GL out there!

It’s not something that has ever been disclosed. A-net has said that, in terms of mystic forge use, your chances are ‘better’ with exotics than with rares…. but I’ve never seen an actual drop rate published or verified.

Vol.5241:

I think the main reason why people started the thread was because they didn’t like DR.

Well the solution didn’t specify anything to fix DR, so I predict a massive amount of ensuing complaints.

The thing is, I think DR may have been a whipping boy for something it wasn’t doing. If you saw yourself doing damage to targets, getting XP for kills, but getting no loot…. it feels like something is wrong, and that must be DR right?

But Colin’s post seems to indicate it had more to do with how we were flagged as ‘loot eligible’ and less with a notion of DR at all.

I’ll reserve final coments for what we see in the patch notes and what the game play actually feels like, but I think this can’t be anything but a good thing.

Trinity != interesting.

Trinity does not inherently create an interesting or difficult mechanic. It is a method of dealing with difficulty. Here’s what trinity does to distil an encounter down:

Step 1: The encounter deals a lot of damage, we need a sponge to absorb that damage
Step 2: The encounter deals more damage than the sponge can absorb, we need someone to heal the sponge
Step 3: Our sponge and healer aren’t very effective at killing the things dealing damage, someone go deal damage to fix that problem.

That’s not interesting, or challenging. It doesn’t allow you to do anything fundamentally that you can’t build in GW2.

In GW2, I have played characters that ‘tank’ an encounter, leashing mobs / bosses and absorbing damage while the party ressed or dealt damage. I’ve been a support bucket, pouring out boons and party wide heals, and I’ve been a fountain of DPS, chugging away at boss HP….

The notion that GW2 removes trinity is based on the notion that every profession has methods of executing in all of those roles…. not saying that you can’t play with those roles.

To get back to the OPs question: What would make an encounter more difficult?

I agree that with experience, things become farmable / repeatable with ease, and that isn’t experience with the dungeon over and over again… an experienced player in Dungeon X can quickly pick up the mechanics of Dungen Y and be successful.

What type of difficulty would be more rewarding?

Going to be anecdotal here for a moment…. I like TA, it’s one of my favorite dungeons because it has more mechanical depth.

There are two different group compositions I’ve done for TA that stand out in my mind:

Group #1: 3 GS ‘zerker warriors + 2 melee guardians. We steam rolled everything, killed everything, and no one went down. It was a rush, it was amazing, and one of the most fun runs I’ve had in TA.

Group #2: 1 ’zerker warrior with a longbow, 4 rangers with longbows. I was stunned, and flaberghasted when I joined the group to be the only person not on a ranger. We cleared with ease, dangerous foes were kept at range, imporant targets were called and hammered into the dirt…. I had every pre-concieved notion I had of how the dungeon worked fundamentally altered.

So, I ask the question: What gap is there between melee and ranged? Both methods are viable, both work just fine. Melee range is a risk / reward system…. you get higher damage working in melee range, but more exposure to 1 hit boss mechanics. Less time to ‘see it coming’ as it were.

Want to be powerful in GW2? Learn how to float between melee and ranged based on needs and be effective in both ranges

You know, the more I think about TA, the more I think it’s one of the better designed dungeons in the game.

Oh, it could use more WPs, but Robert has already commented on that…..

TA gives us packs with mixes of mechanics: Knight + Cultist + Duelist…. makes you prioritize targets and work through the mechanics of the fight.

TA makes you develop situational awareness. Blooms are a hazzard on the course, you cannot insta-dodge without being aware of positioning and if you’re going to hit a bloom or not. You can also use blooms for a ready rally…. blooms are a good thing!

TA has some great boss fights…. the only boss that I dislike in TA is the third boss in Up/Up… the egg sacks around her are clearly meant to be a hazzard, but everyone just pulls her into the hall and fights her there… and as such, she feels lacking.

When you really start breaking TA down and looking at it, it has everything a dungeon should have:

1) Challenging boss fights.
2) Challenging trash that can be skipped or fought…. but skipping is not as faceroll easy as skipping trash in other dungeons, so skipping starts to take on a level of skill…. and both approaches feel more legitimate.
3) Non-combat mechanics: F/U and the springs
4) High value rewards: Onyx Lodestones / Cores

It’s a really, really good dungeon. I kind of wish more were like it

Okay, so, I don’t WvW much, but I’m finally getting ‘round to the notion of chasing a Legendary. Thus far, I’m sitting around 200 WvW kills and 13 Badges of Honor and thinking “there has to be something I’m missing to get 500 of these things…”

Mostly, I play as a skirmisher, 1v1 / 1v2 from a thief because I’m working map completion at the same time, but I’ve tried the zerg fest as well….. I feel like in the zerg fest, maybe I’m not ‘tagging’ enough, if the drop mechanic for Badges is anything like loot in PvE but I just don’t know.

So, help a rookie out, what am I doing wrong if my main goal is to accumulate badges?

Thanks for the tips all!

Bartas.4908:

Shouldn’t the precursor be something obtainable via other means then just buying it from some TP leech? Personally I’d rather dump 1000g worth of rares into MF than make some goldseller/TP manipulator rich.

I will happily sell you those rares as a method to acquire the money I need to buy the precursor I want

Do they exist? I imagine the recipe would be 250 ancient short bow staves (or longbow) + 250 ecto + mystic coins + eldrich scroll…. but maybe they’re more like The Anomoly and require a Bloodstone Shard?

Anyone have info / able to test?

Thank you…. I’ve tried making this point elsewhere but without breaking down the costs in such a granular fashion. Hopefully this will help people see the light a bit.

Zenyatoo.4059:

Crazy knockdowns -> All the dogs, the wurms, the husks and the knights. The husks are actually fully capable of chain knocking you down, even if you pop a stunbreak during it. It’s hard/impossible to maintain stability for the entire duration of these fights, meaning that engaging a lot of enemies in melee can be more hassle than it’s worth (wurms excluded. Easiest to melee these guys)

I wanted to address this specifically. When I go to TA on my guardian (and I usually bring mine if no one else brings one, else I’m on a ’zerker warrior or a thief) I find that maintaining stability through the trash is one of my #1 priorities. But… I can chain through Stand Your Ground + Virtue of Courage, pop Renewed focus, hit the virtue again, and then have SYG ready to go again… gives an extended period of stability. Combine that with GS#5 for mob controll, and someone who can toss out a little cripple, and the packs of wolves, hucks, knights and whatever become very easy to break down.

I’ve also done this dungeon with a Warrior + 4 rangers…. and we longbowed virtually the entire thing. I kept looking for good moments to haul out my greatsword, but asside from a few of the bosses, it was easier to just work with everyone else at extended range.

The KD mechanics in this dungeon are strong, but they can be worked with and mitigated. The fact that they’re melee range KD means if you can just keep them away from you (Rangers are good for some of that) you can avoid much of this mechanic (I know the leap from the knights is punishing…. but there’s usually only one or two of them to deal with at a time…. just make them a priority target.)

I will say this, I see groups have more trouble working to skip some sections than it would take to just kill down the trash, but that’s been my experience.

I’ve never attempted a full dungeon without a full party, but I did wind up 2 maning the entire end boss of TA Forward / Forward last night. I ran a guardian that tanked / kited the adds and did what DPS to the boss I could while a mesmer managed most of the DPS from range.

The other 3 people were stuck defeated from where they died standing on a branch trying to break the spawn of veterans :P The one vet they successfully got to spawn up there killed them for the effort. I laughed a bit.

Took forever though.

sostronk.8167:

Personally, Ill be really interested in the next MMO that makes crafting unique for each individual account and by this providing a way to make a profit in the TP. Ive made profit from crafting on one occasion just by accident when I stumbled upon a chef food recipe that I randomly did a check on and realised the cost to purchase the items to make the recipe was less than what it was to craft and sell it. I sold about 780 from memory and made a small amount of copper per recipe after tax. But what I want is for my crafting to be unique, or very limited, to the point where people want to purchase my crafting output on the TP.

The only place I can think where this holds true is in a system like Second Life where you can actually work at a mesh / texture level to produce a unique item. In a game with millions of players, what kind of system would allow you to produce a unique item without giving you access to the ability to create custom skins / meshes?

Don’t get me wrong, with the right toolkit (similar to TorchEd for Torchlight1) for rigging particle effects, and the ability to import a mesh from my modeling program of choice (yes, I still use Hexagon because I got it for an insanely low price,) along with textures painted in my texturing program of choice (photoshop, because I’m too cheap to buy z-brush) …. Yeah, I could “craft” some bad kitten items.

But that’s an entirely different skill set from what most people are talking about in terms of crafting in MMOs. So I would ask: How would you change the crafting system to allow for ‘unique’ items to occur?

Warchiefomega.2738:

From a business stand point, this whole discussion about getting precursors is exactly what they want. They want people to get frustrated and just give up and buy gems for gold. If the precursors did have an actual recipe then they would not make any money. Currently that is their giant money sink. It thrills them when they see people saying how much gold they spent on purchasing those those rare weapons and to see absolutely no result, and conspiracy theory here so don t freak, it could be possible that they flag your account to not have the precursor forged. I don’t actually believe that but when i see people say “oh i got it on my 5th try” it just makes me think that there must be some limit on how many come out of the forge.

1) A-net has flat out stated that accounts are not flagged for ‘bad loot’ or any such nonsense.

2) A-net has stated that they want the mystic forge to vacuum crafted goods out of the economy as a means of keeping supply of crafted goods in balance over time, else crafted goods would pile up to the point of being worthless. That is why they want us hucking hundreds of rares in the MF.

3) A-net has also said that the best chance of getting a precursor is not from hucking rares into the forge, but rather from hucking exotics in the community. If the community insists on using a sub-optimal method, who is making the intelligent choice here?

4) Please stop with the conspiracy theory of: “A-net lets us convert $$ – > Gold via gems so we are forced to do that to buy high end items, etc, etc, etc.” A-net realized long ago that people want to convert Real World Money to In Game Money, and have used non-sanctioned methods of doing so for years. Rather than allow that toxin to polute their game to an obscene extent, they have created a vehicle to do so legitametely. Yes, some people will use this vehicle to get end game items, but the end game is not balanced around this vehicle.

Sauzo.6821:

Actually if i recall, ANet said they fixed that and now it will still hold the legendary status but we don’t know if it will be upgraded to ascended status when they put those in game. ….

I’m having a hard time finding the post to link to directly (too many results for the search strings I’ve tried), but when Ascended gear launched, A-net did confirm that Legendary weapons would be upgraded to Ascended in terms of stats so that they would maintain their ‘best in slot’ nature.

Of course, A-net will also release Ascended Weapons that have the same stats that legendaries have, so…. not like your legendary is anything more than a cosmeticly neat Ascended weapon…. just like right now it’s a cosmeticly neat Exotic weapon….

pinkbunnies.4620:

Ursan.7846:

Then people will just hoard commodities to avoid this tax.

Why? Also the gold will have to be in someone’s pocket and will end up siphoned out of the economy through the tax anyways. Someone’s always going to end up holding the hot potato/without a chair.

In GW1, we used Ecto as currency. In GW2, you would find people using Lodestones as a method of banking wealth.

Tax = Bad…. Sinks are things that people should choose, if you implement a Tax people would rage quit quickly, and the high level community (ie, the wealthy) can have a staggering impact on the game when you start to irk them (watch what happens to lodestone prices when they realize that they have to store their wealth as goods, and buy up the available supply to do so.)

Giving them something to spend their money on, something that encourages them to voluntarily siphon hundreds of gold out of the economy… that’s what a good sink does.

Which is why I go back to expensive armor (like t3), neat weapons (like the cultural weaps, but purchased with coin.) and other cosmetic enhancements…. The suggestion for player housing a while back is another great opportunity for a sink.

Sauzo.6821:

And if this system is functioning as designed, then it’s one hell of a dangling carrot system. It’s even more hardcore than “gating” content since at least in “gated” content, you can work and see progress til you get into that zone or dungeon. Here you don’t know if you will need 1 try, 5 tries, or 5000 tries.

I fail to see how any part of the legendary system is remotely connected to gating when it is a 100% visual difference designed to be pursued by the hard core gamer.

It staggers me, when we have amazing weapons in this game like Volcanus, Vision of the Mists, The Anomaly, Azure Flame…. The list goes on…. stunning weapons that can be earned with Farming + Achievement in Dungeons + pure investment in time…. but no one seems to care.

People are completely bypassing the Mid Game rewards, and the types of rewards that are available to the more casual gamer, and focusing on the most elite items in the game.

I know some people are fixated on the promise that Legendary will always be ‘best in slot’, but seriously, it’s no better than the other high end crafted exotics. I would not be at all surprised if we had the ability to upgrade the high end exotics to Ascended exactly the same way that they enabled the Triforge Amulet to be upgraded to Ascended.

So, why bypass the mid range rewards entirely and then protest that the most elite rewards are ‘too exclusive.’ ?

Just wanted to toss a statement out there from Mike O’Brian (emphasis added in bold):

Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone

So…. system broken, or functioning as designed?

And, seeing as this discussion is taking place in the Crafting sub-forum, where there have been frequent threads on weather crafting is needed or not, I would suggest that someone who doesn’t want to be tied to the TP, but does want to work on a legendary like Twilight should consider gathering all the mithril and t5 mats they can to forge their own rares to huck into the forge….. rather than spending the money buying crafted rares to do so with.

Or, keep buying your crafted rares off the TP…. I’ll keep selling them to you, I promise!

Khisanth.2948:

CassieGold.7460:

1) The ability to produce best in slot gear to stay on par with other means of gear acquisition

The addition of Ascended to the list of filters in the crafting interface suggests this is already being worked on.

I have no doubt. My only request would be to allow the crafting of ascended gear via a method that didn’t involve a vial of mist essence as that stuff hates me :P

Just to make this really clear: You want to forge Twilight, you’re okay with the cost of the 100 lodestones + the cost of the hundreds of ecto + the cost of the stacks of Orichalcum ingots you need…. but the cost of the precursor bothers you?

I have never understood this……

Drachshyish.2319:

CoF hates my warrior, I cant use Whirlwind everywhere…
See how silly your argument is, sure you cant spam Death Blossom, spam Heartseeker like every thief in WvW for instant win instead.

Not to be a troll with it, but you can aim whirlwind, not so much with Death Blossom.

Minion of Vey.4398:

I’m not sure what people expect out of crafting. Do they want every random thing they make to be profitable? How could the game even function if that was the case?

I feel some times like yes, this is what people expect. Every time I wade into a thread and try to explain how to profit via crafting I get the answer back: “That’s not crafting, that’s playing the TP.”

Maybe in some games, the process of crafting is so unappealing to the vast majority of people that for the few willing to partake in the activity there is profit to be had… maybe crafting in those games is something that creates an opportunity for people who wind up with their face in the dirt in end game content…. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that crafting in GW is easy to learn for anyone, and takes a higher skill curve to use effectively…. If all you want to do is gear your own characters, its easy to do that, and accessible to everyone. If you want to make money… that takes some skill beyond pushing the buttons and watching your character stand at an anvil.

Essence Snow.3194:

I’m still of the opinion that it would be best for the health of the game to make the gold sink progressive.

In the case where relatively few players effectively pool gold from the masses they could take out all they needed without much detriment.

15 dollars makes a detrimental impact to someone that has 100 when most things cost 20.
30,000 dollars makes an impact to someone that has 100,000, but not really a detrimental impact when most things still cost 20.

When the majority by large only have the 100 you’ll do more harm taking more from them.

The best Sinks are vanity, not forced. If you try to tax large transactions at a higher rate, prices will inflate to work around the higher tax (people already adjust sell orders around the 15% TP loss) and it puts higher end goods further out of reach of the common man.

But, if you put in pricey armor, say with neat visual effects, and sell it at 50g – 100g per part…. then the wealthy choose to pour their money into a sink, because they get visual bragging rights of their wealth… and it looks bad kitten

Minion of Vey.4398:

In general, you’re better off selling the mats.

However, don’t think that you can’t profit with crafting, you can. However, it’ll take analysis of the TP much like it does just buying and selling for profit. If you just blindly make an item and sell it, you probably lost money. There are windows of time where all sorts of items are profitable to make and sell however, vs selling the mats. When one window closes another opens. Funny enough, opportunities to make money are more prevalent on sub lev 80 items, where less attention is paid to any particular item vs the lev 80 item market which receives the most attention.

It isn’t uncommon at all to find things in the mid levels that cost 10s to make and are sellable for 20s.

You couldn’t be more spot on here. I was stunned while leveling a craft that the mid level greens were worth significantly more than what it cost me to make them… was not intentionally looking for that opportunity, but was thrilled to find it

Lengthy discussion of Sinks vs Faucets in game and the state of the economy:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Does-the-economy-need-more-gold-sinks/first#post1425687

A couple of things:

1) My warrior is traited 20/20/0/30/0, and I have a love of being traited deeply to tactics. I wear a blend of ’zerker’s and rampager’s gear because I like my bleeds to hit a bit harder and you get a bit more crit rate for the rampagers than the berserkers…. all my trinkets are berserkers.

That being said, by traiting heavily into tactics, I have a deeper well of HP than many of the warriors I run with…. and that well of HP lets me do exactly the sort of thing you described in some boss encounters… I walk out at low health, my pure berserker companions are downed.

2) Don’t worry about gear checks so much, it tends to only happen in speed clearing groups, avoid those and you’ll be fine.

3) One of the keys is to make sure your gear complements what you’re trying to achieve. I focus on critical damage, maintaining fury (I stack fury to 3 minutes of duration), and triggering on crit procs. So, berserker’s gear = more crit rate and more crit damage, rampagers gear = more crit rate and more condition damage…. I let my traits and my dodges take care of survivability. If things are really hot, I can always drop out to long range.

If you aren’t working a crit focused mentality, and your goal is more to maintain boons / banners / shouts on the party, and hold agro….. you don’t need the crit rate, but doing things like running Cleric’s gear to put more umph behind your heals may be worth while.

In the end, it’s your warrior. If you don’t like GS, that’s fine. People tell me all the time that I would be better off with a rifle instead of a long bow for my ranged weapon, but…. I’m traited for the condition damage to leverage the burning to greater effect, so I ignore them and go about getting the job done my way :P Besides, rifle has no AoE, and I love being able to set a fire combo field with waves of trash to clear

Hope all that helps, it’s a bit rambly

Leave mithril alone… it’s used to craft the lvl 80 rares that people huck into the mystic forge for precursors ad-nausium.

Elder wood logs occupy a position similar to mithril, but again, used for lvl 80 rares.

Going a step in a different direction, the vast supply of mithril serves a purpose in upgrading the material to orichalcum via the MF, at an average conversion rate of nearly 10:1….

yeah, mithril is fine.

Ursan.7846:

Weeeeeeeeeeeeell not necessarily. You still needed gold to buy the fancy skins if you didn’t feel like farming dungeons. Like Voltaic Spear/Frog Scepter and stuff. Not to mention other frivilous stuff like purchasing alcohol/sweets from players and that 7IDs for 5plat (or was it the other way around?)

And I also believe (correct me if I’m wrong) but the rare mat merchants actually varied their price depending on how many people purchased/sold that certain mat. Which was a fascinating concept back then, and kinda of a “duh” now with the player-driven economy.

So far as I can tell, the GW1 traders used a process remarkably similar to what they implemented for the Gems – > Gold → Gems conversion….. and there were times that the GW1 traders were flat out of supply, you couldn’t get some fine mats out of them no matter what you did.

One of the big differences to me, GW1 vs GW2, is that GW1 had several prestige armor sets that were expensive (gold sinks) where GW1 you only have 1 for each character.

In both games, it’s common for people to have 2 full armor sets with different stats / runes…. In GW1 you might have both of those armor sets be expensive armors, but in GW2, if you want to have 2 different looks, you’re looking at a t3 set, and a transmuted or straight up dungeon / crafted set…. only one sink.

I would love to see more high end armor sets available as gold sinks

Well, from A-net’s perspective…. concurancy is rising, total daily player count is rising, so more people are entering the economy….

I haven’t seen anything to believe that there is a downturn coming that would be wide spread…. the value of luxury items continues to climb measured over time, and the value of staples has not shown any significant decline that can’t be attributed to clear external forces (Mithril is down…. in a month where 500 salvages is part of the monthly, this is not a surprise.)

So, no…. I don’t see a ‘downturn’ for the economy coming.

If you’re alluding to a price spike in precursors, that accompanied a change in the look of many legendaries, and put an increase on demand…. that bubble may have burst, but the precursor market != a market indicator.

Weaponsmith and Armorsmith are tough to run at the same time because they compete directly for virtually all mats. The place you can get the most relief from the overlap is by focusing the discovery you do as a Weaponsmith on things that use Wood (Axe / Mace / Hammer) and save some of your metal for armorsmith…. wood is cheap by comparison, and you can gather wood in tandem with ore so you’re getting access to more nodes.

Fine mats will also put the pressure on, one place you can get the most bang for your buck is to get the recipies for karma that allow you to craft Rares….. you can usually manage to sell off the crafted rares for either a small profit, or break even, and you need to craft fewer of them to get significant chunks of crafting experience.

When tagging between the two professions, refining raw mats will move you a chunk…. but you refine till you stop getting ‘good’ xp from the refinement (turns blue from green for xp gain) switch to the other profession to keep refining at a higher exp value while you still have raw mats to refine, rather than hucking it all at the ever diminishing value in one craft.

Hope some of that helps and GL on your legendary!

I’ll go one step more granular…. when crafting for profit in JC w/ exotics, plan to move 1 neclace in one stat set, 1 neclace in a 2nd stat set, and do the same with earrings and rings….

If you have 15 Ruby orbs, plan to make 1 earring, 1 ring, and 1 necklace, not to make 3 rings…

Omniderad.2713:

As a JC I am finding it isnt worth making items to sell on the TP. I can sell the materials and make more money.
Do all professions feel the same? Can a JC give me some tips, items to craft with profit.
thanks all

I generally find my best profit comes from working with crafted exotics, but the velocity of those items is rapidly diminishing with Ascended gear getting more available, and once people have the laurals for ascended amulets, I expect that market to cool a bit more.

You may find some niches in bulk orb promotion (t5 dust + t5 gem → t6 orb) but the only way I’ve found that to have a good return is if you have a glut of t5 dust to clear.

The market it tight….. but if you focus on selling at the ‘lowest offer’ point, and aim to move 3-5 exotics at a time (different ones!) then you can recoup your investment + profit within 12-24 hours of the items sitting on the TP.

Generally, I re-purchase ecto when I pick up my profit to keep my supply of ecto moving upward, but I don’t bother re-purchasing base mats, since I prefer to work from supply that I’ve gathered.

You can still profit with jewel crafting, but I ain’t gunna lie on this one, you have to get savy with the TP to do it. GL!

Scootabuser.4915:

Death Blossom is TERRIBLE DPS, it is a PvP ability.

If you want to roll condition in PvE go Necromancer and you will cry over all the time you wasted thinking 3 bleeds was good.

3 bleeds no…. but chain DB x3 + some caltrops and you start racking up 12+ stacks of bleed Of course, if you want to spam DB that fast, you risk falling off a cliff some times…. which was the point of the thread :P

DeathPanel.8362:

Firstly, the conversation is not about SE nor was my post about SE.

Secondly, it’s your choice to not skip optional mobs, but to turn around and complain about the totally optional encounter being too difficult for a certain class/weapon setup under only specific situations that are easily avoidable is not valid.

1) I like to broaden the conversation when possible to illustrate that the issue is applicable to more situations than the one originally expressed, the comment was not aimed at you in specific, but was meant to add breadth to a conversation.

2) I’m not arguing that it makes the encounter more difficult. Frankly, if you can’t position to land DB successfully, you can chain auto attack and spam Heartseeker through the encounter while still maintaining poison from the auto attack chain to get some leverage out of a condition spec.

the point that I want to make is that narrow confine encounters are limiting on this skill compared to similar skills in other classes.

Suggestion for improvement != statement that the current options are not possible, just that the status quo is sub-optimal.

Follow up for comments about mobs not being able to be knocked off cliffs: The devs have weighed in on this (I think in the Events section) and said that it’s because if certain mobs were knocked into places that they were un-reachable it could break event pathing and lead to events that failed to start…. less of a problem in the confined world of dungeons, but implemented as a behavior world wide.

Suggestion for operating in the environment with the current behavior of DB: Dodge Roll that drops caltrops to position for DB, launching DB, then dodge rolling back into position before hitting DB again gives you 2x sets of caltrops under your target to stack more bleeds, and is the most viable way I’ve seen to use the skill to optimal advantage in the current setup.

I think this comes down to group planning. Dungeons are designed to reward group play, and the dev’s have acknowledged that they expect coordinated teams to be more efficient than PUGs, but that PUGs should be able to succeed.

If your group plans around conditions people will be using with the goal of keeping a boss at bleed cap, or 100% up time on burning, etc, but scales back on overlap you can get a powerful combination of direct damage and conditions….

For the un-coordinated group (not saying skilled, just not coordinated at a build level) direct damage is simpler than worrying about coordinatng conditions.

Imryn.2879:

CassieGold.7460:

Noerknhar.3826:

That was a month ago. In terms of a game that is on the market for about 5 months, that’s like a decade.

Right, a month ago, we knew it wasn’t on track for the Jan / Feb / March patches.

So…. why do we expect continual updates saying ’It’s still not happening in Jan / Feb / March…’

And in the lifespan of an MMO, a month is a short time compared to the total life cycle of the game’s live support and content updates.

The lifespan of an MMO is ultimately decided by the players not the developers.

If the developers ignore the issues that players are concerned about in favour of their own ideas then they might find out that 5 months isn’t actually all that early in the lifecycle after all.

GW2 is shedding players – in my guild 80% of its members have already moved on to other games and with Eldar Scrolls coming out soon that will only increase.

I just want to mention that anecdotal evidance to the contrary, the info from the Devs is that concurrancy and pupulation is increasing:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7133/Guild-Wars-2-Februarys-Flame-and-Frost-Update-Detailed.html

Also, since the recent patches, my own anecdotal evidance is that /map chat has become more active in every map I’ve been on than I’ve seen it since launch.

Lucas of the Desert.2165:

Syeria.4812:

Ensign.2189:

The only gold sink that actually matters is the 15% trading post fee. The rest just encourage/discourage certain behaviors and give a skeleton to the reward structure.

The economy would be fine if the 15% trading post fee was the only sink in the game.

While I’m sure the TP fee is the largest sink, don’t underestimate the amount of currency taken out by waypoints and repairs. Even tiny sinks like salvage kit prices end up making a large impact.

But is it enough to counter a solid 26silver per 30min on average of hundreds of thousands of players? Can’t imagine they’ll keep those rewards in their game forever without introducing new sinks ^^

^this^ more than anything else, is why I asked the question. At the upper end of game play, and the people who move and shake the ‘luxury’ end of the economy, WP costs are trivial, and repair bills just don’t happen often. As more reward mechanisms are introduced that involve non-gold methods of acquisition, it takes pressure off gold based luxury sinks (T3 armor, I’m looking at you….) because people have many alternatives.

I think the sinks in place at the low end of the economy are fine (WPs, armor repair), but that once people pass a certain threshhold of wealth, there are insufficient sinks to slow down the steamroller. Just a thought.

DeathPanel.8362:

Wrong. Most of the fights do not take place on narrow bridges, and even those that do are often skipped anyway.

I wanted to comment on the skipping…. there are those of us out there who roll in static groups that both kill the bridge boss, and the unified ooze boss in CoF p1. If the boss in either of those fights winds up somewhere near the edge, you quickly find yourself in a position where DB falls out of use and you’re down to other skills….. when DB is a core part of how you stack bleeds, it kind of sucks to cut it out. At least the warriors can aim the way their whirl goes…. thieves…. not so lucky.

Also, fights in places like the end of SE Story that can put you on bridges over lava are also a problem for unintentionally spatting yourself into hazards that should be a no-brainer to avoid. And they are a no-brainer to avoid…. just stop using one of your more useful skills!

Mystic coins are used in several of the high end recipes in the mystic forge, I would save them as you’ll have significant use for them later on.

Most of the recipes that use Mystic Coins also require skill points, so plan to start using them after you already have all of your skills, when you start to realize that you have skill points to burn

I’ll drop the topic of crafting being profitable, I think, at this point, it’s a dead horse.

I’m going to be snide for a moment and distill some of the suggestions down to the following :

Crafting would better if it were difficult enough (arduous enough) to discourage the average player from being able to craft, reducing the population of people willing / able to craft, and there by creating a market opportunity.

To me, that’s what arguments distill down to.

If you increase material cost to craft, you increase the ‘grind / farm’ time required to collect base mats, which discourages the more casual gamer from bothering, they’ll just sell mats to people willing to craft because they never have enough….

If you increase scarcity of materials, making base mats harder to obtain, you get the same result….

Alternately, crafting should produce better gear than is available elsewhere which will:

Devalue dungeon gear, karma gear, and loot drops
Encourage people to grind their own crafted gear to get “Best in Slot” gear (and if you don’t believe that, look what putting ascended gear in fractals did to everyone who needed ‘Best in Slot’ gear)

I would strongly suggest that the only 2 things crafting needs for improvement are:

1) The ability to produce best in slot gear to stay on par with other means of gear acquisition
2) More unique / rare craftable skins, which should be created more by crafters and less by the mystic forge.

I would love to see exotic skins available for 1k+ dungeon tokens that would allow someone who put in some sweat equity to craft something that people who didn’t do the leg work couldn’t craft… and that was bad kitten enough looking that people seriously wanted it. I would love it even more if that recipe required more tokens from that dungeon every time you crafted the item so that simply having the recipe wasn’t access to “turn key wealth.”

I would equally love to see recipes that required multiple crafting disciplines to produce an item. Gift of Wood + Ancient Staff Shaft + Ancient Staff Head + t6 fine mat = Something Cool…. now you have a reason to be both a Huntsman and an Artificer…..

As always, rotten tomatoes and rejoinders are welcome, I wear at all times a flame kittenant vest when posting on forums

blinkxzero.8035:

As a thief, sometimes throwing Shadow Refuge on the boss is helpful for both ranged and melee who are getting low — it’s field has a life steal. This is, of course, if it’s not getting used to res people.

Only problem is sometimes it stealths the melee (drops their aggro) and the boss comes running at a ranged person

Want more fun? Drop Shadow Refuge on top of the Ranger’s Healing Spring, and stand side by side attacking from range

So, the guild missions are coming in the end of month patch, and my guild is looking at upgrades that we don’t yet have, and wondering if there are any of them that we would need pre patch.

Specifically, Politics Lvl 5 isn’t used for anything, so we haven’t spent the influence on it, preferring to burn influence on guild buffs for the weekend when most of our guild members are playing (it’s a small guild, less than 40 total members.)

Should we be planning on securing those final upgrades that currently seem to have no purpose, or are we okay where we’re at?

I was dropping Temporal Curtain durring a CoF run, while fighting the effigy…. one of the guys in the group asked why since no one needed the speed buff, and was then confused when I said: “because it’s a light field…”

Combo fields are a huge way to support your group, even on skills that don’t seem to have high value situationally for their inherent ‘obvious’ use, by placing combo fields for your team you can be an additional support asset.

Same reason I drop symbol of swiftness in places that no one thinks it’s needed…. light field = good

Small suggestion, if you want P/V/T armor, dungeons are a good way to go

Xaaz.8472:

I think a better example is why does it cost 40 silver to change your crafting professions when you want to make something but it only cost 3 silver to respec your entire character build.

If you want to completely respec your character, you’re talking about a full new set of armor + new set of runes and a cost significantly higher than the cost to retrait….

Honestly, I hate to advocate for using alts but 2 crafting professions + 5 character slots lets you master everything and just relog to an alt if you need to switch to something that’s not on your current character.

Not that I don’t have a few characters with 3-4 professions maxed, but once they ding 80, I tend to leave them parked on something I don’t have covered by another character.

A glob of ecto is a ‘rarer material’ … my evidance being anecdotal and coming from several runs of salvaging 20+ rares at a time, my average yield over time is around 80%, give or take a few percentage points. Last night, I trashed 4 rares and got 1 glob sad night, but RNG is what it is. I’ve had nights where I salvage 20 rares and get 18 globs, and nights where I salvage 20 and get 14 globs…. but it does seem in tune with the chance for rarer materials.